We evolved within the community of life, and yet we humans often consider ourselves separate from nature. Are we unique? Is this distinction helpful? How do our ways of thinking of ourselves in relation to other life influence the identities we carry and actions we take? We invite you to share your reflections as we explore the relationship between humans and nature. Read a story, tell your own.

This series is a partnership with students from Loyola University Chicago's Institute of Environmental Sustainability.

Five Poems

Share Your Reflections

Stay Connected

Get weekly dispatches with the latest ideas from our thinking community.

Share:

Swamp: in the manner of T. Hoagland by Wm. Baldwin, May 29, 2017

If a swamp is just a swamp and not some metaphor of pristine happiness, a glimpse of man before the door was closed (this, too, failing if the door is just a door, and not the portal to a sky of clouds and shades of blue), if life is just a life, if the shifting cypress limbs,the Mississippi Kite, all these white water lilies, and bellowing of bull frogs are not God’s apologies, items of beauty exchanged for the briefness of our days, then we must try to save America another way.

Wild Iris by Wm. Baldwin, May 31, 2017

Flowers have no words for fear,for poisonous snake, extended care. They live each morning as their last. Have no notion of the past…or the future. All’s between, the culmination, gentle dream. Still, as they fade, our want’s betrayed. Such it is poor beauty’s made.

In Memoriam by Wm. Baldwin, May 24, 2017

I like to think my father rules a universe of frogs, of grumping frogs on half sunk logs. And now a gator joins the din. Calling for a mate begins. A snake bird flaps, spreads wide dark wings,and sun embraced, adjusts her stance, cries a snakebird cry. And I? What chance for me? What words for him? Tuesday a week my father would be 103… but long ago he died, pressed a palm to his forehead,and content, at last, to abandon this weary man-made system, sighed.

Another Trump Sunday by Wm. Baldwin, May 14, 2017

It doesn’t worry me how the sun, new sprung from night’s governance, slips her way past pecan leaves, then is made to slide behind some loping clouds, nor how the squirrel swings on the squirrel proof feed-the-birds swing, now set to jingling: ting, ting, ting. No. Not those. It’s spoken words. Silly and ferocious. Words insane. The cavities they cause,the wrenching holes which must be patched or else the air implodes.

The Wood Duck by Wm. Baldwin. March 18, 2017 (for Talking with Birds)

They nest in trees, and please their mates with whistle calls and acorn treats. Of course, there are those decoy ducks, carved from wood to fool and such, but these are not your true wood ducks.

What happens when we see ourselves as separate from or as a part of nature?